thinkrelevance.com Archives - 25 September 2013, Wednesday

Documenting Architecture Decisions Tags: agility and architecture Context Architecture for agile projects has to be described and defined differently. Not all decisions will be made at once, nor will all of them be done when the project begins. Agile methods are not opposed to documen...

In this landmark episode, Craig interviews Justin Gehtland and Rich Hickey as they discuss the merger of Relevance and Metadata Partners (the company behind Datomic ) to form a new company: Cognitect . They discuss why they made the decision to join forces, what will stay the same wit...

Relevance and Metadata Partners Join Forces to Become Cognitect It is with great pleasure that I announce that Relevance, Inc. has joined forces with Metadata Partners (makers of Datomic ) to become Cognitect, Inc . Cognitect maintains all of what made Relevance great -- the same team...

Relevance and Metadata Partners Join Forces to Become Cognitect It is with great pleasure that I announce that Relevance, Inc. has joined forces with Metadata Partners (makers of Datomic ) to become Cognitect, Inc . Cognitect maintains all of what made Relevance great -- the same team...

I've said it before: one of the few downsides to working at Relevance is getting to hear all sorts of cool customer success stories that we can't talk about. Which is why Justin and I were thrilled to record an episode with Kurt Zimmer from Room Key , one of our clients and an enthusi...

Notice that some things which are "global" from the point of view of the application, such as my web server and scheduled thread pool, become "local" instances in this data structure. Any function which needs one of these components has to take it as a parameter. This isn't as burdens...

Architecture and Financial Success Tags: architecture , design , properties , and non-functional requirements At our most recent internal conference, Tim Ewald gave us a passionate talk on the topic of architecture and design. He said that a successful solution must deliver features ,...

is the organizer of some of the best conferences I've ever been to (and one I haven't): Strange Loop , Clojure/West , and Lambda Jam . He is also Relevance's newest employee. As we both found ourselves in Durham recently, it was the perfect time to sit down together and talk conferenc...

You've had the joy of listening to Craig's insightful questioning of our guests for a long time now; it is our great pleasure to turn the microphones around and capture Craig Andera on the other end of the questions. Guest host Justin Gehtland gets Craig to talk about his career path ...

Tags: refactoring , abstraction , and leverage A colleague of mine recently accused me of speaking too precisely. He was giving me a bit of grief, but I took it as a compliment. In this industry, we torture words until they give up all meaning. Keep your eyes open for the next time yo...

To help people understand the concepts in Pedestal App, Brenton Ashworth recently authored the Pedestal App Tutorial . I highly recommend people check it out - it's a great resource. On this episode , Brenton does a great job of explaining the concepts in Pedestal App. I'm sure you'll...

Tags: naming , object-oriented , philosophy , and language Why is naming so difficult? We write functions and arguments, or classes and methods, all day long. Every one of them has a name. With all that practice, you would expect us to be good at it. One reason is that names are alway...

Those of you lucky enough to have heard Neal Ford speak on anything know that he is one smart, funny, and perceptive dude. It was my great pleasure to have him on the show, where we talked about Evolutionary Architecture, Clojure, Datomic, the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld, the ThoughtWor...

Listeners of the show need no introduction to Rich Hickey , even if he had not already been our guest twice. In this episode, we talk to him about his latest brain gem, the core.async library. It was an illuminating discussion, and I thank Rich for taking the time to explain the conce...

Tags: retail , ecommerce , vector space , mathematics , encoding , and immutability Long hours driving the open road grant me that rare luxury: time to think about everything and nothing. I love freely associating ideas as the miles roll by. Over a brief vacation this past week, a few...

Turkey Tacos and the Giant Smoking Crater Tags: project , product , crunch time , and organization Here's a short experience from a project I was on long before joining Relevance. It might be interesting or educational. It was October in Minnesota. Fall is a time for endings, and my c...